Bike Challenge Off to Strong Start!

We have been working diligently to improve the website and offer our users an intuitive, functional and inspiring website ahead of our May 1 start. As our current user base knows, it’s been a work in progress and we thank you for your patience. We have truly appreciated your understanding and your constructive feedback as we work to phase in functions.

Many of you are asking, 'why the change?' It is a multi-faceted answer so we wanted to take some space to provide the answer and share with you are vision for what’s to come.

Why the new website?

We want the National Bike Challenge to be accessible for ALL users.The only way we could see this happening was to offer an independent website that integrates multiple apps, and users can still enter miles manually like the old system. With the rise of smartphones, we wanted to make sure our Challenge users can log miles as easily as possible.

You’ll find that each of the apps -– Endomondo, MapMyRide, and Moves -- offer distinct tracking tools, unique interfaces and accommodates a variety of riders.The new website will also allow us to integrate more apps in the future. We want every bicyclist to have an easy way of logging their miles into the National Bike Challenge system to grow our community of bicyclists beyond our current goal of 50,000 riders. We envision reaching monumental numbers so that bicycling becomes everyone’s first choice for recreation, transportation, commuting -- whatever the reason!

The new site also allows a larger focus on Local Challenges. At the League, we want to offer our local partners the best possible tools to promote bicycling at the community level. The website gives local groups more space to tailor their message, promote their group and showcase their local partners while still collecting valuable information about ridership in their community.

Businesses now have the ability to offer internal competitions when there are multiple locations of the workplace. U.S.-based companies with worksites across the globe are now united in their Challenge. A company can now enter an unlimited number of worksites to compete collectively as a workplace, while maintaining each worksite’s unique employee make-up, allowing for a friendly internal competition. This year workplaces will compete based on their total number of employees. Workplaces are now ranked by points/1,000 employees -- get ready for a more equal playing field.

The Comments Section has always been a vibrant part of the National Bike Challenge –- we love hearing from you! Share information with the community about your morning ride, what inspires you, why you ride, and what tips you seek, what advice you have to offer, and what resources you have to share.We realize this is an important part of the Challenge so it appears on the home page and we’ve dedicated a full page to it here (you must be a registered user to view this page). We encourage you to be a positive and supportive voice for your local and national community. We want to hear from you!

If you are a local advocacy group that would like to host a Local Challenge in your community, please register for the webinar scheduled on Tuesday, April 8. Click here to register. We will also be hosting a webinar for businesses on Thursday, April 3. Click here to register.

Comments

Alan (not verified) Says

Would love to see Strava and Garmin Connect integration as well!

March 28, 2014 at 1:43pm

Nick (not verified) Says

Everything on the new site is so big and there's so much white space, it makes it really hard to focus and take it all in. I've found that if I use my browser's zoom function and put it down to 75% it's much more pleasant. I don't usually have my browser full screen either and without zooming below 90% there's a horizontal scroll bar, that's not cool. (Even this blog post I can't see in it's entirety without going full screen, what do your web designers have against windowed browsing?)
PS And now I can't submit this comment, and when I fail the verification I'm taken to the top of the page so I can't see it failed unless I happen to scroll back down, that sucks.